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Project Background

The Digital Twin City Viewer is developed as part of the DTCC project phase 1 (2019-2024) and is a platform to develop, test and produce user-centric web applications and workflows for digital twin cities. It also connects to the DTCC Platform which aim is to efficiently bootstrap geographical areas on top of national data, and also enable to continuously update this as part of the digital twin city evolution process.

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The Digital Twin City Viewer is primarily targeted to prototyping in research and try different concepts around visualisation, real-time communiciation and workflows for digital twin cities. But the ambition is to develop the platform to be used more and more for real world use cases as part of a wide range of digitalisation in the built environment.

The concept of "digital twins" evolved during the project from being static 3D models to more and more include processes and how do maintain and update assets as part of a living replica.

A lot of efforts are made to create support for graphical representation in digital twin cities, but this projects has gradually focused more on the processes and complementary web based application support.

The coverage of what functionality the digital twin city consists of is also very different from case to case. This is why we try to use our experience with the use cases to turn that into a reusable set of modules and tools.

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Rather than creating a new digital twin city viewer "to rule them all" we propose to create targeted interfaces for specific use cases, using the right resolution of graphics and time.

An important part of research projects is to gain and spread knowledge and guidelines. After digging deep into the technologies behind digital twin cities, both in terms of graphics and processes, we saw that using existing platforms, frameworks and development principles is much more efficient to maintain and extend functionality as many developers should be able to achive more with less effort. With this said the efforts of learning about the underlying technologies and principles are crucial.

One of the biggest challenges of simply relying on existing solutions and abstraction layers is to fundamentally understand the technologies. This can have implications on security, maintainability, scalability and performance. Performance is a typical bottleneck in digital twin city applications with the need for a lot of graphical rendering and additional data processing.

One of the main ideas behind the Digital Twin City Viewer is to provide a platform where a combination of well-documented and tested platforms, frameworks and modules can be used to create new digital twin city applications.

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Rapid movement towards AI generated code and UI also advocates for a more streamlined approach to development where value from following conventions in developer communitiy and developing with high speed overcomes the need for intricate and sophisticated manually constructed solutions.

Read more about the viewer background in the viewer section.

Read more about the platform background in the platform section.